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Best Duck Pond

Forest Park

Murphy Lake is sheer bucolic splendor. Accessible yet secluded, it provides an ideal spot for gazing wistfully, walking leisurely or attempting to feed the beautiful wild ducks that sometimes alight but want nothing to do with you or your bread. Fuckers. The best place in town to feed ducks is only minutes away, at a series of unnamed "ponds" between Round and Murphy lakes in Forest Park. They're often marshy and usually smelly, and their banks are coated in the excrement of the birds that swarm the place. Look, the L.L. Bean-model waterfowl are fine for some things, but the nature of the duck is not in the main contemplative; ducks equal action. And here, all it takes is a handful of stale bread to bring out the duckness. There is no better winter fun than to wait for a freeze and stage bread competitions between the ducks and the geese. Given their quickness, low center of gravity and willingness to look foolish, ducks win most every chunk of bread lobbed onto the frozen surface. It's some fun, and ducks seem to enjoy it as much as the geese do not, so it's good in all ways. But, please, for the good of yourself, the ducks and all, do not encourage or reward those ducks that chase other ducks, biting them on the butt.